LES TROIS-ILETS, Martinique -- On April 27th, the former
pirate islands of the French Caribbean celebrated the 150th
anniversary of slavery's second abolition, in 1848.

Slavery's first abolition in the French Antilles was at the height of
the French revolution in 1794. The half-million slaves who had
made San Domingo the richest colony in the world rebelled under
the leadership of Toussaint L'Ouverture. They succeeded against
all odds, creating independent Haiti -- in its splendor and misery
-- while the revolutionary government in Paris proclaimed
emancipation throughout the rest of the French West Indies.

In Guadeloupe, the dominant white "Messieurs," frightened by
L'Ouverture, handed their island over to British rule in 1794
(which lasted eight years). But while Haiti remained chaotically
and even tragically free, slavery was reinstituted in the other
French colonies under Napoleon in 1802, and lasted for another
46 years, until the bourgeois European revolutions of 1848.

Today the West Indian islands have lost the economic rationales
which made their colonization, and population with plantation
slaves and indentured Indian laborers, so profitable. The
labor-intensive sugar-cane plantation, devoted to export
production, was the first modern factory farm.

The slaves had been imported from the mid-17th century onward.
The white population -- today less than 5 percent in the French
West Indies -- was originally composed of buccaneers and
filibusters converted to commerce, followed by officials of the
newly formed European trading companies, plus redundant
aristocratic second sons, persecuted French Protestants, poor
whites -- and, under government sponsorship, orphans and
indigent women.

They all lived off sugar. But cane sugar succumbed to beet sugar,
and the islands turned to growing bananas, and to diversification
into cotton, indigo, and coffee. Cane sugar production in the
French Antilles now is less than a quarter of what it was even in
the 1960s. Banana production is doomed by U.S. exports of
industrially grown fruit from Hawaii. Other tropical fruits face
Israeli and African competition.

The globalizing economy has mostly condemned the West Indies'
attempts to diversify, although cocaine for the booming North
American market has yet to be tried on a serious scale. That
seems the logical next step for some of the area's islands, a
product uninhibited by World Trade Organization rules.

There is always rum, but the international market is limited, and
nearly half the production is consumed at home. In Martinique,
surviving plantation owners admit -- over that lime-and-rum,
followed by the more or less straight rum, with which proper
lunches begin -- that the island lives beyond its means. This is
quite true. In Guadeloupe and Martinique, more than a quarter of
the population is unemployed.

A majority benefit from one or another subsidy from the generous
French social security system. GNP per capita (at current
exchange) is around $6,500, less than a quarter of the French
national average, although Martinique and Guadeloupe both
legally are part of metropolitan France, the equivalents of U.S.
states.

The French support their ex-colonies out of a sense of obligation
and the national conviction that France must behave as a world
power. This involves some sound reasoning as well as pride,
since these islands in the Caribbean, plus French possessions in
the north Atlantic (off Newfoundland), the Indian Ocean, the
Pacific, and the Antarctic, give it one of the largest claims on
seabed territorial rights and resources of any nation in the world.

There nonetheless is something sad about the islands, for all the
style and originality of West Indian music and popular culture.
The slave past oppresses, and threatens cultural identity and
political ambition.

In April the press was recalling the intellectual and cultural
movement called "Negritude," an influential reassertion in the
1930s of West Indian identification with Africa by the poet (and
political figure) Aime Cesaire. However there are many members of an older
generation who still do not want to hear about slave origins or
Africa.

A younger West Indian intellectual, Patrick Chamoiseau, says that
the African identification leaves everyone else out, and promotes
a lack of national assurance. He says that the ordinary person in
the islands believes that "we are a bastard people, too small,
undefinable, with no real culture, an empty thing which has to be
filled from elsewhere."

"We lack interior authority" he says, "based on what we really
are and what we can do." He says that it is necessary to
acknowledge the Creole identity, the racial mixture, and go on
from there. "What we are is that. It's based on diversity. It's a
result of mixture. It's a necessary way for us to live, to expand."

It is in fact the modern condition, not only that of the Creole
Caribbean. It is the condition of a Creole world in which, for
better or for worse, the racial, ethnic, and national borders all are
being torn down, and people mixed up, no longer sure about who
they are, or should be.

4/21/98: A terrifying synthesis of forces spawned Pol Pot's regime4/19/98: Russian-German-French structure of consultation is good development4/16/98: Violence in society comes from the top as well as the bottom 4/13/98: Clinton's foreign policy does have a sunny side, too 4/8/98: Public interest must control marketplace 4/5/98: Great crimes don't require great villians 3/29/98: Authority rests on a moral position, and requires consent3/29/98:Signs of hope in troubled Russia 3/25/98: National Front amassing power3/23/98: NATO's expansion contradicts other American policies3/18/98: The New Yorker sought money, but lost it3/16/98: America's 'strategy of tension' in Italy3/13/98: Slobodan Milosevic may have started something that can't be stopped